"Kill one and the rest will go away." This is how you scare the crows, Mr Cooper, a white Zimbabwean farmer, tells young Elise. Elise and her mother have come to live on the farm, where Elise's mother is the new book-keeper. Cooper tells the gardener Jonah to string up a dead bird: sure enough, the others fly away. And when Mugabe-sponsored war veterans begin to take over white farms and white farmers begin to be killed, Elise thinks she sees Jonah in the crowd. What his exact role is in events never becomes clear. This is a world of suspicion, rumours, divided loyalties: of black and white, servant and master, Rhodies and British whites. In her debut novel, Andrea Eames captures brilliantly the atmosphere of corroding trust that pervades the Coopers' farm.

Elise had grown up on a farm in the middle of the bush. The landscape is familiar: there are witch doctors, ant lions, a black nanny the young Elise loves as her own mother. In between hunting for tokoloshes (bush spirits), riding horses and taking care of her young cousin Hennie, Elise tries to make sense of the injustices of the adult world. The blacks are patient, forbearing; some succumb to Aids. The whites call the blacks munts and kaffirs and play drinking games, one of which includes sticking a cocktail stick in your forehead and setting light to it. Although not all the whites are so unsympathetically drawn – Elise's mother is subtly portrayed as a woman who is coping with life rather than enjoying it – the picture is one of white complacency and black suffering.

It's well-worn territory and rather better captured in the memoirs of Peter Godwin and Alexandra Fuller. In fact, due to the episodic nature of the writing, The Cry of the Go-Away Bird reads a lot like memoir. The novel sets off slowly, uncertain of its narrative arc. Scene follows scene: Elise grows up, goes to school, loses and makes friends, goes through puberty. But so far none of it quite amounts to a novel.

The story gathers steam when the farm invasions begin and politics alters the relationship between blacks and whites. The sands of trust are forever shifting and Eames's description of how the two groups steer around and at times into each other crackles with tension and authenticity. In one excruciating scene Elise's mother and step-father entertain the black foreman and his wife to tea in an effort to win friends. Resistance is expressed in small ways. Jonah refuses to trim the bougainvillaea, no matter how many times Cooper asks him. The ever-cheerful maid Saru would sometimes "look at us with a cold, absent gaze, as if a mask had slipped for a moment".

Eames has an elegant way with words: a nervous grin "hovered like a pale moth in front of his sun-reddened skin". However, she overplays difference at the expense of characterisation. Elise, who was raised in the arms of a black nanny, a short time later seems to find black people totally alien. Invited home by a new friend, Elise "sat quietly at their table being small and pale, while white teeth flashed around her, hands gestured and voices rich as molasses talked in two languages". Kurai is "exotic" and "other" and returns from trips to the countryside with an aura of "tribal secrets and black magic". But surely this is the same countryside where Elise grew up until just a few months ago?

Eames is a young writer with talent, whose novel tackles matters of substance. But a novel should be more than the sum of its parts. Despite some memorable moments and an insight into what life must be like on white-owned farms in Zimbabwe, The Cry of the Go-Away Bird falls short of its full potential.